Just more pictures

I was trying to figure out how to do a closeup of my Liatris spicata this morning, when a roaming butterfly came by for a drink. A rare moment of quiet for both of us.

And a "Hi, Granna!" from Lazarus:

Giddyap

Have I mentioned how much I love this camera? Not just because it takes great pictures but because it lets me capture moments like these. Jai and Omar came over yesterday with Cebollah (seh-BOY-yah, Sp. for onion), and Laz took a short ride around the field with them:

A thought

Blair's Blowback, by Gary Younge
From The Iraq Project -- an excerpt of an article published in The Guardian on July 11, 2005

"We know what took place [on July 7th, in London]. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

"The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not be equated - with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with. "Collateral damage" always has a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand action.

"These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market."

More cutie-patootie

And now, a new feature: um, I don't know what I'm calling it yet, but basically I want to occasionally highlight content from the great sites listed over in the right-hand column. So without further ado, today I want to push some good news on a big scary topic that's dear to my tree-hugging heart: global warming.

The Revolution Will Be Localized
from Alternet, July 20, 2005

"Local politicians, from governors to mayors to city councils, have taken the fight against global warming past Washington politics and directly to the people.

"City leaders from around the U.S. were treated to a rare bird's-eye view of the environment earlier this week at the Sundance Summit, a three-day mayors' retreat on climate change hosted by Robert Redford in Salt Lake City and at his 6,000-acre resort nestled beneath Utah's Mount Timpanogos, near Park City.

"...The summit was just the latest in a string of recent efforts to galvanize local action on climate change. This year, at the urging of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, more than 170 mayors nationwide have pledged to adopt Kyoto targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The New Cities project, launched by Madison, Wis., Mayor Dave Cieslewicz (D), has a network of mayors working to implement on the local level the energy-independence proposals of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, environmental, and other groups that aims to spur eco-friendly economic growth. The Institute for Policy Studies in June launched a Cities for Progress campaign that's pushing for energy security, among other goals."

New digital camera. Wow. WOW.

I managed to catch this lizard, who's a regular in my front garden, with the camera's great zoom (optical, which really counts). It's the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z10 -- no, I *didn't* get the $500 Canon Powershot S2. For $350 less, I think the image quality is acceptable... this version is Photoshopped down to user-friendly Web size, but the full-size version is amazing. For my amateur stuff, this camera is awesome.

So here are some pictures (finally) of the play quilt I'm making for the kids:



And the kids (this is from my old camera, but I just got around to Photoshopping them):



More to come later -- Laz and Papa get back from camping today (Omar and Jai took them to Bear Trap Canyon overnight), and Maggie will surely be finished being grumpy after lunch and a nap.

Big. Splinter. Ow. Ow.

Okay, okay, I'll wear real shoes outside from now on. I got not one but two big splinters -- nay, spears -- driven into my right foot this afternoon, and not only did (do) they hurt like hell, I no longer have health insurance. Heh. The first one came right out, being a rather cleanly shorn hardwood fragment, but the second one (which came a mere 20 minutes after I cleaned and slapped a band-aid on the first, then put my flip-flops back on to go finish my yard work) -- holy &#^%. It's all out now, all the nasty disintegrating pine fragments, and both holes have been duly cleaned, disinfected, and covered. I used Laz's neon bandages (I asked his permission, and he was happy to oblige), and tonight he said, "Mama has TWO bad owwies on her foot!"

Yep, Mama's a slow learner.

A Vacation at Long Last... Oops.

We went on a Real Vacation for the first time in... I don't even know. It lasted, oh, about two hours. Fun times.

We left June 16 (that's last month now) to visit Antonio's uncle in Albuquerque and then drive further north to our regional Quaker yearly meeting (our first time going) at Ghost Ranch, just past Abiquiu (it was georgia o'keefe's estate). What a spectacular drive, and we'd just finished dinner and were starting to meet cool people (Quakers are very liberal Christians), and Lazarus was already making friends, and then we got a message to call Antonio's uncle, who only knew where we were because we'd taken the time to visit...

Turns out Antonio's father had died and they found him on Thursday -- if we hadn't stopped to stay with the uncle (who's on the other side of the family, but somehow news got round to him), no one would have known where we were, and. Well. That would have been "bad." So we broke off our socializing, ran back to the room we'd just set up, packed it all back up, and got back in the car at 8:30 p.m. to drive north to Denver. I took the mountain shift (deer and elk really do leap out randomly in front of moving cars). Antonio took over once we hit I-25, and we got to Denver around 2:30 a.m. I did mention to Antonio that I'd like to stay in a hotel instead of crashing at a relative's house, and he agreed, so at least we got a few hours' good sleep.

Apparently, his dad had a heart attack or a roving blood clot and died immediately, which I guess is for the best because Chuck always said loudly that if he ended up in a hospital he'd pull out the damn tubes and be a pain in everyone's ass so they'd just let him go. Antonio is kind of stunned (they've always had a turbulent relationship, so the feelings are both intense and mixed), and I'm sad, especially that the kids won't remember him at all and he didn't get to see them this summer. Lazarus sort of seems to understand what "died" meant, since kitty Georgia and dog Chica both died recently, but he and Maggie were both -- how shall we say -- out of sorts, being away from the comforts and routine of home for so long. We had a lot of stuff to take care of and a lot of time to wait, to think, to miss home, to plot an early escape (that was me after the first week).... It was, of course, anything but a vacation, which is selfish of me to feel and write but DAMN it has been a long three weeks.

Home: a ten-hour drive on a cracked tailbone (I slipped down some stairs while cleaning Chuck's house), with a three-year-old screaming out three weeks' of pent-up frustration and a one-year-old feverish with strep throat, in a car that threatened to overheat if I dared to drive over 65 with the air conditioning on, packed to the roof with crap we don't need but didn't know what else to do with (Antonio drove a truck loaded with the rest of said crap). Home: running on fumes between Belen and Socorro because the power was out at the lone outpost along those 40 miles, and thank God for 32 miles per gallon and a sudden tailwind. Home: to a refrigerator full of food that would have lasted just fine over our four-day vacation but -- yeecchh, and to houseplants that actually survived three weeks of drought (8 of 12 made it, anyway), and to gardens that mostly survived thanks to the drip system I'd just finished (just a few plants drowned or seared because I hadn't yet figured out their adjustable emitters), and to a dog who bounded over the fence and leapt onto the car dancing her happy-dog dance when she saw us pull up.

There's no place like home.